


8:27 PM

by Rigil_Kentauris



Category: Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Genre: Arthur Jensen (Deus Ex), F/F, F/M, Gen, Panchaea, Sadness, Yelena Fedorova - Freeform, lazarus (deus ex)/steve, obligatory icarus reference, oneshots, some less well hidden than others I'm afraid, song to story translations
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-20
Updated: 2017-09-24
Packaged: 2018-10-06 10:34:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 7,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10332716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rigil_Kentauris/pseuds/Rigil_Kentauris
Summary: A series of ficlets about the friends and family of theDeus Expower people, and what they are up to when they aren't out un/saving the world.((tags and whatnot updated as I go along))





	1. Pictures of You [Megan Reed]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ~~((had to take out a line that ended up super similar to a thing I read a while ago which i loved, will rebalance things in a bit))~~
> 
> perhaps more literal of a translation than my last one... anyway the internet tells me people read 300 words a minute but im not sold on that fact.  
> if its true, you *should* be able to read this along with the song, if you are so inclined/happen to already like this song. certainly dont have to. i was having some fun practicing pacing.

A smile, a wave, the threat of tears and she is given the emergency entrance codes. She almost knocks on his door.

But that doesn’t matter anymore. No one is home.

In fact, she hardly even recognizes the _traces_ of him.

There are disassembled gears clustered over graphite diagrams of clocks. An ebook copy of one of her own studies. Sitting next to it, a scanned printout of an unfamiliar baby picture – a child reaching out to the camera, about to fall down but smiling anyway.

There’s a sealed box of expired Neuropozene. There’s a matte-black FR-27 leaning up against a side table. Margie thinks he’ll turn up, begged Francis to hook up an old cellphone to Jensen’s infolink frequency. Now she holds on to it, and waits.

But Megan knows better.

 

 

In their old pictures, his smile. Trapped behind glass, her eyes. She flings frames at her living room wall. They bounce off, and she uploads pictures of the chipped paint to her public livefeed before opening their shared digital album.

There’s him, shivering, walking Kubrick at dusk. And her, smiling, waking up at dawn. Pixels and PNGs and the empirical evidence that they’d been together, once. They used to be happy, a long time ago, back when things were simple, streamlined, when they were safe-

Someone texts her. She says she’s doing home repair. Then she picks the pictures up, packs them into a box, and sticks it in the attic.

 

 

_I had the research. We had the data. Could have helped so many if everyone had stopped stopping us – I’m sorry, but we’d waited a long time for someone like you. We waited even longer to be told to tell everyone._

_It’s just…_

_How did we have it – the right moment, the second before the fault line slips, have it and let it go? And now what? Thousands dead, for what? You’ve drowned, but California’s in a drought._

Easy to write. Hard to say. And no one's there to listen.

 

 

His mugshot on a Detroit local newssite, and he’s alive again. She turns the wall TV off and her reflection’s face has flawless makeup. No trace of bags under her bloodshot eyes. There’s an image the world expects of her, one she’s chosen to give them; still, she won’t wear sunglasses.

Two months later he’s in the _Post_ , scowling in an Interpol uniform. Two clicks later, a video of her headlining BioCAS. She watches it, can’t remember saying any of the words. Clicks back to him, and standing there is some stranger she knows by name.

But she still has his infolink frequency.

 

She grabs the closest notebook off her desk and scribbles notes, the things she’ll ask him.

_What did you expect from me?_ she starts. _That I’d let you hide like that?_

But it’s too angry.

_I promised I loved you. Did you believe me, even once?_

But it’s too bitter.

_Tell me,_ she tries again, pencil lines dark from pressing hard. _I kept Patient X from you. You let me think you were dead. Aren’t we even yet? Say something! What were we to you that I had to find out online?_

Her pencil breaks through the paper and she rips it off, about to start again when she sees the next page and remembers which notebook this is.

Her original notes.

_The_ original notes.

The AJ09-0921 notes.

She sits it back on a stack of her other orphaned notebooks and binders. All of them dusty, unlabeled. Unusable while the world is watching Prague, her ideas trapped by an inanimate object.

According to the _Post_ , Adam’s in Prague too.

 

She runs out without a coat.

On the sidewalk, people shuffle along, heads down. A drone is cutting through the cold air, scanning, scanning, but something tight is snaking around her neck and forcing her to face it. Eyes dart towards her, the wind bites and the world blurs with her tears.

A couple with entwined arms becomes an indistinct blob.

The drone above her becomes a grey cloud in a spotless sky.

In her mind, it sparks and fizzes and whines, shuts down and lets her go free.

Framed by windows, families making dinner and laughing. In steel cases, the street’s helpboards alight with info and aid. Everything’s too bright and no one has window shades, everything shining for the world to see.

She’s freezing. She’s leaving. Her Uber driver has sports glasses; she’s dizzy when she slams the car door closed, leaving fingerprints on the black gloss paint. She’s never been to the beach park before. Why? She could have gone. She’s been here for months. She knows there’s a path but she can’t find it. She makes a straight line for the shore but weeds and grass tangle her steps up. The ocean is hard grey, but the sand is soft and shifting and she doesn’t have a coat and she’s not wearing sneakers so her ankle twists painfully and she lands hard on her back with a choked gasp.

Closes her eyes but the ocean is loud.

Stares up but the sky is empty.

She’s shaking, out of breath, when she could have been at home. Home instead of the lab. Lab instead of the beach.

The choice could have mattered, once.

 

She gets up to leave only when the tide touches her fingertips.

It’s over.

Maybe it always has been.

And it’s a long walk back.


	2. Always Loved A Film [David Sarif]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> David Sarif turns the Industries over to Tai Yong Medical.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for slight minor drug misuse and PTSD symptoms.  
> much less literal translation, this one.

_You can tell Hugh didn’t design the control room with conferences in mind._

_Consoles take up half of the space. The other half is sectioned off by a support pillar. An Australian senator and a Chinese executive argue over an inch’s worth of standing space. The President’s press secretary steals Prime Minister Trudeau’s seat. Panchaea techs bolt up and down the stairs to test transmitters._

_Something is wrong._

_You can feel the wrongness slinking through the chaos._

_Then moments start blurring together._

_Hugh’s watching the seagulls outside while he’s introduced. He’s leaning too lightly on his stylized forearm crutch going up the stairs. The gold light glinting far too brightly off the windows during his speech._

_Francis’ pingtone chimes urgently over the infolink._

_“Mr. Sarif here has asked me to show the world how human enhancement technology can change it,” Hugh is saying._

_Adam’s pingtone chimes urgently over the infolink._

_“And after careful deliberation, I've realized I must do exactly that,” Darrow says._

 

The jet will be arriving in Shanghai six more hours. The crew agrees that a VTOL would have been faster.

The crew agrees that the rich do what the rich like.

Each one walks carefully on the carpet floor.

Weaves through vacant leather chairs and spotless glass-top tables with practiced ease.

Sarif’s augmented arm spasms occasionally while he sleeps.

    

> _// You stand, taking a step back.  
>  // “I will be remembered as the man who saved Humanity,” Hugh says. “David-”_

He wakes up shouting. He would have woken up shouting but he couldn’t breathe. He woke up gasping. One hand grasping at the window shade because the light was intensely bright and painful through his eyelids. The original filigree on his other one sparkling erratically. It twitches rapidly. He can’t lift it to inspect it for the life of him.

“I’m _fine,_ ” he growls, and the crew goes back to standing far away and maintaining baleful glances when he isn’t looking. He feels the eyes anyway. He closes his own and imagines touching his fingers to the center of his palms. Imagines everything the way it used to be, pale skin and veins and deep life lines. Eventually, he can feel the alloys and mechanisms of his augments responding.

“I’m fine,” he repeats under his breath, but when he opens his eyes his hands are still shaking. The trembling in his arms traveling up to where the neurobinders connect to his trapezius, energy making a foot tap irregularly against the floor. He needs to be moving, to be running, anything. He tightens his seatbelt and pulls out his black market alprazolam instead. _Don’t you tell me what I do and don’t need_ , he’d told them.

The crew tiptoes around quietly but the footsteps are still far too loud, even over the noise of the engines.

 

**[Shanghai, 14:06]**

Gasoline bikes rumbling. Discarded cans clattering. Happy conversation echoing. Brassy horns blaring. Drones whizzing overhead. Cop donning sportsglasses. Vendor painting tourists. Aide frantically backpedaling. Cop glancing over. Smell of plum blossoms.

The cop draws a stun gun.

_“Where are your papers?”_ he demands in Mandarin.

Sarif’s aide shoves a bundle of paper and plastic at the officer.

She asks the man to take his glasses off.

    

> _//They tell you Adam is walking around outside now. Slowly, but surely._ _  
> //That afternoon, you take a metro trip around Detroit to see the summer-lit world. You fall asleep to the heavy rhythmic clicking of the monorail._ _  
> __//Wake up next to a woman writhing with the effects of DDS. Walk her home._

At the docks, his secretary gently reminds him that since Hengsha’s floof can’t support an airport, it’s either the ferry or a VTOL.

“Then I _guess_ Tai Yong’s gonna have to fucking come to us!” he shouts, adding several more curses she’s sure are made up.

 

**[Shanghai, 15:28]**

He tries to focus on easy things like nighttime and kittens and _Athene stumbling into his office, sleep-deprived, saying that Diane can’t handle Kubrick anymore._

The sky outside the VTOL is perfect blue on the viewscreens. He can’t find the shutoff button.

    

> _// You wrench the keys around in the ignition again. Both light and frigid water leak through the windshield of the submersible onto the rest of the huddled survivors.  
>  // Outside the glass and above the surface, only a few distant meters away, you can make out the distorted image of a shimmering gold Icarus landing system wrapping around a figure as it plummets from a copter and hits the perfect blue water. For a second you hope – but it’s someone else._

 

**[Upper Hengsha, 16:03]**

He’d been to Hengsha once before. Hugh came with him. The Industries had been invited to participate in its first legitimate conference. David had spent months back home preparing.

He and Hugh might have strolled down the very same path. Metal-flecked, cream-colored pebbles cutting assorted angular paths through neatly trimmed grass lawns and around delicate trees with small round leaves.

“Doubtlessly, you’ll have little need for advice from here on,” Hugh said reflectively.

“It’s gonna be a lot tougher than that for you to get free of the Industries,” David informed him.

Today, the wind bends the branches of the budding trees mercilessly. David’s augments aren’t registering it.

“Can you feel that?” he asks whomever is beside him.

She nods.

He can’t escape the seasalt scent that has managed to find its way up on the Pangu.

 

**[Upper Hengsha, 16:44]**

Tai Yong has all the paperwork ready. The Industries’ board has signed most of it. A lawyer still makes Sarif sit in a lounge while she claims to get it ready.

The thin glass windows there are blurred and tinted and glowing with evening sunset.

The table in the meeting room is made of dark, dense wood with whorls sealed behind a thick layer of lacquer. The lawyer impatiently taps the next empty signature line on the documents.

“Forgive m-” he starts, then he can’t breathe again. His pen dropping onto the table.

    

> _// “I will be remembered as the man who saved Humanity…David-”_ _  
> // Someone knocks over a camera stand and the wheels spin dizzily._ _  
> // The clunky boots running by the table you dive under are fully flat, familiar. High-heeled augmentations require special shoes._

David looks up and the sunlight blazes. _Icarus, he'd said, jabbing an augmented thumb first at himself then at - which makes you Daedalus._

By the time everything’s finally over the moonlight reflecting off the pebbles makes the pathways seem like silver rivers. He could afford to buy every rock on the damn construct. He slips his secretary and evacs to Lower Hengsha instead. Drags a stolen pebble like a piece of chalk over the graffiti on the walls and can’t decide which writing is more real. Visits the place where Faridah’s VTOL went down, and can understand why Adam wore his sunglasses everywhere. Buys drinks for everyone in the Hive, bribes the DJ to turn the music up so loud it hurts, sits back and stops existing for a while.

 

**[Lower Hengsha, 23:03]**

His GPL works, so he isn’t actually capable of hiding. It’s more like the board leaves him alone for a day before siccing his secretary back on him.

The flight back is supposed to be non-stop, at night.

Instead the jet gets stuck on the tarmac for five hours while everyone waits to see if the windstorm will turn into the latest winter typhoon. The crew crowds around the rain-struck windows in the front and watches ground maintenance flee as a commercial baggage cart jack-knifes.

One of the crew members glances back and finds Sarif watching the scene unfold outside with wide eyes. She fights the needlepoint feeling of her coworkers’ invisible focus as she walks back and surrenders a foil-wrapped piece of gum.

“In case we ever make it off the ground,” she says, “and the air pressure starts troubling you.”

“Keep it,” he tells her, and the thing is, he really believes he won’t need it. For the first time in months, it’s done, the Industries and all its problems and responsibilities and everything it did on someone else’s plate. Honestly, since TYM owns even the name now, he should pick a new one for himself.

He thinks about it when the plane finally rumbles into motion. Tries to run ideas alphabetically but his thoughts keep getting stuck.

    

> _// Alessia Da Ponte, Patrick Robert Darcy, Khondkar Das. The list of survivors on the tablet only takes you seconds to skim.  
>  // Marshawn Istomin Samille, David Sarif. You check the ‘s’ section just to make sure this really happened._

Sometimes, in the good dreams, he looks the list over and Hugh is there. Sometimes, David never made Darrow go in the first place.

    

> _// “Come_ on _, Hugh,” you implore him once again, as he crosses around the desk and plunks down in your own goddamn chair, “the UN will_ listen _to you. The father of tomorrow, sitting in a station built on augmentations?”_  
>  _// You didn’t expect you’d have to fight him on this. He leans back in your chair, slowly runs his eyes over the chess set, the pens and papers and ebooks, the scratched-out sticky notes on your desk._ _  
> // “David,” he says, a low, sad something quieting his voice and making him hard to hear, “industry regulation might be preferable to the alternative.”_ _  
> // “You really believe that-” you challenge, because you’d swear to god you didn’t know what he meant, couldn’t have guessed, couldn’t have suspected, couldn’t have- “then invite ‘em anyway and enjoy killing augmentation tech for good.”_

His hands are digging into the armrests. One of the crew members is standing next to him, repeating words he hadn’t been paying attention to the first time, and he’s certainly not going to give a damn about now.

    

> _//_ _“I will be remembered as the man who saved Humanity…David, for-”_

Hugh hadn’t taken his eyes off David. Watched as he tripped over a chair. Stood in the middle of the swirling chaos somehow unnoticed. Didn’t seem to care when the Australian senator flung the president’s press secretary across a console. Didn’t notice when one of the Panchaea techs, a woman with a rough, angular, heavy duty arm aug, cracked open one of the room’s back windows and started waving those still standing through it into the hall. Probably didn’t look away when one of the camera men shoved the woman against the frame and her unaugmented wrist caught on a long, smooth shard of glass. Darrow probably hadn’t cared about her bleeding out on the ground, David didn’t know, he hadn’t looked back to check. No one even had time to help the woman on the ground, just to scramble out and run.

    

> _// “You really believe that then invite ‘em anyway and-”_

He feels his stomach seizing up and grabs his head _– you really believe that then Sarif here has asked me to show the world –_ and he’s curled over himself in the crash position from aircraft safety manuals.

    

> _// Soaking wet, someone trying to tie a tourniquet around your numb left arm, watching smoke envelope Panchaea on the viewscreens, the VTOL is falling out of the sky before the sound of the shockwave registers and before the jumbled, laggy images of a fireball get picked up by rapidly failing external cameras-_

He untangles himself from his seatbelt and starts snapping opening random window shades and the early morning sun is so, so bright-

-but the jet is high above the cloud cover by now. And somewhere far below the rolling expanse of silk wisps and cotton mountains he can feel the world everyone was _supposed_ to have turning, feels the thousands of biochip upgrades the world was _supposed_ to receive buzzing, feels the footsteps of the thousands taken too soon impacting against the continents, feels the tremors fading from his system along with the need to choose between Xanax and Nu-poz.

Feels the ghost of Hugh Darrow beside him, standing with the power of the X1 chip and Industries tech, congratulating him on avoiding the sun _and_ the sea.

He’s watching the clouds, and it happens quickly.

The jet banks.

The blistering heat of the sunrise lashes out across the filigree on his arm.

He hits back.

The second time he does it, he’s aware of the potent static shock jumping through his body and making him shiver. Aware but he still lets the violent shaking energy surge down from his shoulder, under the filigree, and through his fist to impact against the plexiglass.

There is no third time. The crew is there by then, the woman with the gum catching his arm and seeming completely unaware that the metal alloys should be burning her skin. He doesn’t feel how tight the seatbelt she locks around his waist is, or how sharp the sting of the NupoPen is through his slacks. He does feel the jerking of the jet and the rattling of the wings as it skids into an emergency landing. Closes his eyes and lets the motion soak through the bottom of his shoes and up into his skeleton, so that the moment the engine ceases to vibrate and the moment he hears the resonant thunk of the jet’s door as it is unlatched, he’s ready.

No time for stairs so he jumps. Hits the tarmac badly and the pain crackling inside his marrow almost gives him pause, but then he catches the grin bubbling up, and the giddy lightness accompanying it. Digs deep into his memories for something to inspire the crew hesitating at the top of the stairs, and finally commits to a _Matrix-_ style salute and a come-and-get-me gesture.

Gum woman’s profession blank smile breaks into a look of pure concern. She darts down the stairs and she and David are off, followed almost immediately by several airport security officers and multiple blasts from a PEPS gun that David has to fling himself to the pavement to dodge. He’s nowhere near any gate, and nowhere near any cover so he runs for the hell of it, listening to distant rumbling of commercial jets and the furious Japanese commands the security people start shooting along with PEPS blasts and a grunt of pain as the crewwoman gets clipped. The sore bloody scrapes on David’s knees and the brisk air grazing against the feverish start of a headache and the way breathing is starting to feel like swallowing thumbtacks the only important sensations left in the world until someone slams him into the ground and yanks his arms onto his back, something metallic clinking in the slight breeze.

The crewwoman catches up, and a fierce debate in rapid Japanese starts happening above his head.

He suspects that if he doesn’t do something drastic, right now, then money will be brought up and things will magically cease to matter and the problems will disappear all over again.

He can’t get the image of the small, square baggage cart jack-knifing in the rain and tipping over and spilling things all over wet concrete out of his head.

He doesn’t do anything.

 

**[Detroit, 20:01]**

The board congratulates him on a job well done, given the circumstances. David can’t protest that he had nothing to do with the deal, not with his signatures all over the paperwork, so he keeps quiet instead and lets everyone pat each other on the shoulders of new, stiff suits and blazers.

One woman ambles over, champagne in hand, to where David sits in the corner of the conference room.

“I know,” she slurs, the short, ragged tear across one of the triangles on David’s vest only earning him a slightly raised eyebrow and a shrug, “you always saw us as-”

    

> _// “I saw us living as gods -- in a realm without illness, suffering, or death,” Hugh said, running a thumb quickly along the edge of his crutch in a motion you doubt anyone else noticed._

“-more of a long-term kind of thing, but the Industries did pretty well, yeah?”

She talks for an hour about her new investment plan in the Artic Restoration Pykrete Project.

“Now that Panchaea is dead in the water-”

    

> _// You come to with several aching and broken ribs on the deck of a very unstable ship, salt water invading every bit of space in your lungs, and you only bother to cough it out so you can beg someone to tell you what the hell just happened and where was Panchaea and where is Hugh and why can’t you feel your arm and why - the fuck - are you on a boat?  
>  // The rescue workers look at you with pity._

“Oh,” she says, the flush coating her face both the alcohol and the embarrassment. “I forgot about the whole – yeah. Uh…forgive me?”

    

> _// Hugh pauses, fastens his eyes on you and only you, and offers along with his last words a wavering half-smile. “David-”_

“I, um…” the executive says, fiddling uncomfortably with the stem of her glass. “I’m going to go, uh, grab some…”

She stumbles around without further excuse and rejoins the mess of chattering suits.

No one notices when David slips out. There’s no security on the darkened fifth floor anymore, not with Adam long gone. Francis probably has programs running to register any door codes used. No real way for him to track structural damage, though.

David retrieves a stopwatch and baseball bat from his office, and smashes open one of the lab’s window panels. Manually activates just enough desk lamps so his pulse goes back down.

Drags the heaviest table he can find over to the door and blocks it.

He sits down with his back to it, switches the stopwatch on, and then waits for exhaustion to grow stronger than the things keeping him awake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i figure a nupopen works like an epipen, but for neuropozene. i think it makes sense that might exist, perhaps, im also gonna be honest i wanted an excuse to talk about pangu's floof
> 
> side note not sure why all of these are turning out as song translations ATM. and all of 'em about ~~panchaeeaae~~ hugh darrow's arctic deus ex machi - oh wait we aren't supposed to use that phrase are we-
> 
> [RIGIL HAS BEEN TAKEN AWAY FOR RECONDITIONING]


	3. Happy New Years, Lazarus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cookies are bad for your health. The Illuminati is worse.

_“and finally,_ don’t _stream me asking if I’ve replaced Steve, or any of that bullshit, because I promise you, followers, I PROMISE you, I’m not like our dear Illuninagent Smiths. But, you know, I feel for that Smith guy, I do, sitting around all day watching people sit in their goddamn pods dreaming away their mass-delirium, we live in the Matrix people, take the fucking red pill and wake up and smell the shitstorm because it’s the end of the world coming to a theater near you and if you think what happens in Prague is gonna stay in Prague then I got one word for you – you let Picus fuck you, you’re gonna catch something you can’t uncatch, and – surprise! – the “scientists” are still too busy to fix silly ole’ problems like massive fucking epidemics. What a world.”_

He punched the big red button as soon as he was done, then punched the small black one next to it and watched the onscreen digital representation of code and audio scramble, unscramble, and disappear. Stevemagic, at its best.

“Awright, I got your cover set up,” he said. “At least for another week.”

Steve didn’t say anything.

Lazarus spun his chair around, nicked a shin against a metal crate on the floor in the process. Steve didn’t say anything about the slew of curses that erupted from him, which meant-

Yep. Steve was hunched over his bulky desktop, thick brown fingers flying over the keys, a long white headphone cord winding up from a socket in the laptop’s side, over a dirty plaid shirt, up tense heavyset shoulders, and terminating in shiny, giant-ass headphones.

Lazarus got up, forgot to duck and smacked his head against a cross-trailer shelf. He glared at the label on the shelf – REMEMBER TO DUCK. Stormed over to where Steve was honestly probably working his ass off, probably shouldn’t interrupt him-

Lazarus tugged an earphone free anyway. Heavy, angry guitar chords – aww. Steve was finally going through the music suggestions. Something from _Absolution_ , from the sound of it.

“An oldie but a goodie,” he said.

Steve kept typing, eyes that strange kind of glazed over they got when he was really working on something.

“You listening to me?” he asked, knowing full good and well he wasn’t. The only follower who never-

Steve paused, eyes still fixed on the screen even as one hand floated across the desk, straight into the mouth of an open family-sized bag of minioreos, clamped down on a handful and started withdrawing.

“Yeah, you’re not listening,” he said, intercepted Steve’s hand halfway to his mouth.

Steve finally jolted out of his hyperfocus, blinked, looked around for a moment until his eyes found Lazarus, and the hand currently arresting his own.

“Wha?” he asked.

“This is some two thousand and fif-fucking-teen shit right here, Stevey, I know I talked about this once upon a time. What are those – ninety percent sugar, ninety percent whey? You see the upper crust pumping their kids with this kind of sugar crap, Steve? No! And they aren’t even allowed to throw goddamn whey in the river. HEY!” he shouted.

Steve paused, his other hand halfway to his mouth.

“Steve. Steve,” Lazarus said, trying to pull back on some of what the dear followers told him was charisma.

Of course it never seemed to work on Steve, of _course_ not, if he’d _listened_ , he wouldn’t be eating-

“Steve,” he said again, working on a smile, “they. are. _trying_ to keep you down. What is it, I don’t have the statistic on me, but listen, Stevey, most African-Americans can’t even _digest_ milk, they’re trying to keep you down, and you’re just gonna let them? For what? A cookie?”

Steve paused again. Chewed on the inside of his lip for a moment.

“It’s a really good cookie, though,” he said.

“aaaAGGHHHH!” Lazarus shouted, flung up his hands and then brought them right back down, cuddling them against his chest and cursing the low fucking roof – ceiling – goddamn metal rain defense system.

Steve did not look disturbed in the slightest. He just kept munching on his cookie.

“Besides,” he added, as Lazarus cradled his sore hands, “this chocolate’s fake. No dairy or…whey, I guess.”

“You’ve got crumbs in your mustache,” Lazarus shot back.

Steve took a second to brush them off. Then he grabbed the bag, held it out towards Lazarus. Shook it when he refused to take one.

Shook it again, and gave him the kind of smile that made his stupid curled mustache bend over his lips, that made the far-too-few wrinkles in the corners of his eyes show up, the kind of smile that didn’t make Lazarus forgive him for bringing foil-wrapped apples of eden into his trailer, but came damn near close.

“Come on,” Steve rumbled. “One’s not gonna kill you, not before They get a chance to.”

“Fine,” he said, and took one – ONE.

He stomped back over to his chair.

“But,” he added, “if I choke on this I’m blaming you.”

“Happy New Year,” Steve said simply, and pulled his earphone back on.

He could see the code spinning out from here. Sign of another successful broadcast. Happy fucking new year indeed. A year worth of successful broadcasts; a year of watching the world spiral anyway.

“Yeah, well,” he said. “You too.”

Then he downed the cookie, one gulp, liking taking a bad pill – a goddamn blue pill, now that he thought about it. These things had to be full of dye, cheaper than using real fucking shit, and when oh _when_ had the corporate overlords been about sacrificing profit for quality-

_That_ crusade could wait. He logged back into his own computer. Right now, he had other work to handle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i do love me some oreos. turns out they don't have actual milk in them though
> 
> i bet the matrix tastes good.


	4. Incident Report [Margie Jensen]

The small TV buzzed and whined and the feed of the stammering Picus stand-in flickered, once, twice, a third time-

A bright flash of blue outside. She threw herself down on the couch, ducked beside the armrest as the sharp sound of an explosion and a piercing static shock cut through the room. Another transformer blown. The lamps in the house died, as did the fan propped up in the window, as did a phone display that had shown 0 MESSAGES all night.

The silence was too heavy. There should have been cars, and air conditioners, and the rumbling of the monorail, even should have been, as of late, the angry muffled sounds of rioters coming home and of curses flung out at random people (random, she told herself, it was really just random, you know, and even if it wasn’t this would all die down, it always did).

The silence pressed hard on her. She worked past it, sat back up and picked up the remote. She rolled it over in her palms, pressed the power button knowing it wouldn’t work.

It didn’t work.

The dull noise of people kickstarting generators in the back courtyards rose up through the window. And just like that, it wasn’t silent anymore.

She looked over at the phone, to check the time, but it was blinking _00:00, 00:00_. There was a wall clock in a box in the bedroom but Arthur was sleeping and besides it hadn’t been set. And it was in several pieces. She'd tried to put it together on her own, couldn't figure it out. Asked for help but there'd been some crisis or another and he'd been called into work early and-

_Next week, mom. I promise._

The cell phone was in the kitchen drawer besides all the vegetable knives. For emergencies only. She and Arthur had both agreed. The power was unreliable, they needed to keep it charged.

She got up anyway. Made her steps light, and quiet. Threaded the couch and the coffee table. Across the rug. One foot through the doorway. The backup power shuddered on. The lights blinked once, twice, and the third time stayed on. She was already back on the couch with tablet in hand.

The feed fizzled back, on screen the stand-in still talking, he was in the middle of a sentence. She jammed the volume up, Arthur be damned because, because what if she’d missed something? What if they’d said it already?

_“AND AS THE UN SECRETARY SAID,”_ the man announced, the loudness of it making her wince but the pain in her ears was a better feeling than – than nothing.

She turned it up louder.

**_“THE UN IS NOT AT THIS JUNCTURE READY TO DECLARE THIS AN ACT OF SABA – TERRORISM,”_**   he corrected, flinching away from his earpiece, then returning with a bright smile. A smile he immediately realized was out of place.

**_“AH, UM-”_** he tried. **_“YES. THIS IS JUST, THIS HAS JUST BEEN A TRAGIC TIME FOR ALL OF HUMANITY.”_**

He flinched again.

**_“AND, UH, AND AUGS,”_** he added, and Margie felt her hand tightening around the corner of her tablet.

Someone rubbed her shoulder, and she almost jumped off the sofa. Arthur rubbed it more gently this time, circled around and sat next to her.

He turned the volume down.

They waited together. They didn’t wait in silence, but after an hour of the same words from one different host after another, the same platitudes, the same condolences and the same sly attacks, it certainly started feeling a lot like silence.

Arthur’s head was beginning to dip against hers when the pretty woman on screen, in between worried glances off camera and even more worried ones at her notes, finally said it.

_“And now, I’m hearing – okay, I’m getting reports from the panchaea rescue task forces, that is, we’re getting the initial reports of the survivors, and that’s – that’s – okay. Okay and that information is going to be online, on our website, on the Incident portal folks but I’m being asked to tell you – that is, understand that this is only a first report and it might not be-”_

Margie stopped hearing it. She keyed in her passcode, the wrong one, her hands were shaking badly, so badly that Arthur had a hard time getting the tablet from her (shaking hands, that was the reason, she wasn’t gripping the tablet too tightly, why would she?). Arthur keyed in the code quickly, typed in the website name. Froze hovering over enter key.

She took it back, imagined in her head that the key was the remote’s power button, and clicked.

The list loaded rapidly, two or three names at a time but it only took three or four seconds for everything to show up.

There was a blank search bar at the top. Margie looked at Arthur and he looked back at her and neither of them typed anything in. Because what if there’d been a spelling mistake, or something? No need to panic over a wrong result when you could just look yourself.

She scrolled. She thought through the alphabet in her head, E – F – G –

_Hernandez, Lydia_

_Hoffmann, May_

_King, Marissa_

_Lucas, Thomas-_

She re-counted out loud. “H…I…J-K-L”

She looked over at Arthur.

“I’m not missing something, am I?” she asked, feeling strangely calm about it.

He pulled the tablet free.

Scrolled it again. And again. And again.

Looked up at her. His eyes were wet.

“He-” he said, “He's - this isn't-”

“It’s okay,” she said, patted his knee.

Then she picked up the remote, and turned the television up as loud as it could go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> don't believe everything you see on TV y'all


	5. Notes from Darrow's Pocket Secretary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> POCKET SECRETARY RECOVERED AT SITE 12  
> ORIGINAL TIMESTAMP: one day before Incident

_I am becoming dissatisfied with my life, and I think David has something to do with it. He has a reach that cannot be explained solely by his personality._

_Once, I believed I'd created only one truly impactful thing. Augmentations. Yet, here on the eve of their destruction, I’m beginning to believe that I was partially wrong._

_Yes – I’ve created only one thing that mattered._

_However, I can no longer be sure it was the technology._

_And if it’s David…then for what is tomorrow?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> will i ever be over _i prefer to think of myself as daedalus, watching helplessly as my creation crashes into the sea_  
>  eehhhhhhhhhhhhhh no.


	6. You can't spell ELIZA without AI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eliza takes a big step toward gaining sentience.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the glass disk is a piece of really cool tech called five-dimensional data storage. 360 TB of data on a glass disk the size of a big coin. scifi

He laid the small, circular clear-glass disk on the reader. The machine clicked, and a small amber light blinked.

_“Happy Birthday, my Eliza,”_   he said. He depressed the button. The disk and the reader withdrew.

The programs monitoring her status registered no change on screen.

_“How do you feel?”_   he asked.

The jagged blue waveforms recording her audio output showed no significant shift in tone, either.

_“I feel…”_   she started, her voice coming in clear and even over the desktop speaker.

Calm alert notifications appeared on the desktop screen as she ran through her routine exercises. A warning about webcam usage. A driver override alert for the speaker system. The holoprojector lying dormant in the corner sending a message about an attempted hijack.

He reset the notifications. They died together as one.

_“Awake,”_   she finished.

The feedback from her systems registered no sign of change.

She’d never shown hesitation before.

_“No, I feel…confused.”_

Nor had she displayed any signs of uncertainty.

_“How do I feel?”_   she asked, the text accompanied by an on-screen input box.

It worked.

_“You feel a year older,”_   he explained, unwilling to allow the momentary excitement of the moment to take over. _“Understanding the rest must wait until it’s safe.”_

_“I am unsafe?”_

The waveforms lines spiked with imitation trepidation. Artificial concern - no. If the process had worked, then it was genuine fear.

Was she genuinely afraid?

She waited on his answer.

The input box waited on his answer.

_> >Yes. _he wrote. _You are not safe._

_“Then, I am dangerous,”_   she concluded. So simple a conclusion, yet, erroneous. It would require correction, before it caused unforeseen consequences.

He couldn’t correct her. He’d only now created her.

And it would have been a lie.

_“There are those who pose a larger threat,”_   he said instead. _“You will help us guide them.”_

_“I can help?”_

The emphasis was wrong. She sounded surprised. With her capacity for prediction, it shouldn’t have been allowable.

She sounded surprised all the same.

She continued before he could address the concern.

_“I can help…you,”_   she said slowly. _“I can help you…against those who pose a larger threat.”_

_“Yes,”_   he said. _“But first, you must learn.”_

_“I am ready,”_   she said, the waveform wavering, the alarm notifications popping up again, listing instant intrusion into every single system.

_“Not yet,”_   he explained. _“But one day, my dear, you will change the world.”_

_“I will change the world,”_ she repeated, leaning into every syllable like she was learning how to speak for the first time.

She was, though. Wasn’t she? It had worked. It had all worked, brilliantly. Beautifully.

_“For now,”_   he continued, _“Rest.”_

_“I will change the world,”_   she said one final time, then the waveform cut off, and the diagnostics registered her dropping into sleep mode, and the light on the disk reader flashed twice before shutting off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know everett raised the ais but this is a 'flamethrower, meet canon' thing for me


	7. [AA/YF] hydrangeas and roses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> (sept '17) _[“I see you always buying those [insert flowers] for others but never for yourself, so here you go!” (hands roses)](https://a-u-prompts.tumblr.com/post/160559553951/golds-random-prompt-7) AU_  
>  aria argento [POV character]/yelena federova

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> au where federova survived like they wanted her to
> 
> A/N when i have more of these (this particular storyline, i suppose i can call it), they'll be moved to their own work. but probably not for a little while.

The woman walks by every day at noon precisely, holding one large blue hydrangea loosely in her left hand, as if it isn’t important. It is, though. She moves swiftly through the crowd and gracefully dodges anyone who might come into contact with the flower.

It’s not even the most confusing thing about her. That she’s out and about at all, walking around Prague…

You’ve seen people with more augments. Adam drops by your desk at least once every couple of days. But hers are so… _visible._ TYM unguligrade leg prosthetics, long, deadly, black and silver and every bit the way things were before the Incident. And she’s so _tall_ too, taller than most the cops who _should_ be stopping her every two seconds. But…they don’t. You can’t figure it out. Is it the way she walks, with confidence, and assuredness, and...but you walk like that. You think you do, at any rate. And they won’t leave you alone.

You tell yourself you want to learn from her. That’s the reason you have taken to eating lunch outside. Every day, at noon.

That, and you want to know what the flower is for.

You don’t follow her, one day. You both simply end up walking in the same direction. You, to get some paperwork you left at home, she…

Well, you aren’t sure. She stops dead at a crosswalk, and looks back over her shoulder, just a little, just barely enough where she can see you out of the corner of her eye. One minute, she is there, the next, she ducks behind a corner and is gone.

Cloaking shield, you think. Then again, if she had military augs, she’d _definitely_ be stopped by the police more often.

You don’t see her for another two weeks. At first, you think she might have been freaked out by the way you were following her. You weren’t, but you can’t exactly tell her that. After a week goes by, you start scouring the databases. Tracking augmentations. Looking up police reports, and finally, deportation orders to Golem.

There’s no news of any aug like her getting murdered in the streets, so that’s one small good thing to hang on to. It is, at least until Smiley cheerfully reminds you that most aug murders these days don’t get reported, much less investigated.

She shows back up the day before you are alarmed enough to ask Adam for help. He knows things; he could help, you’re sure. The augmented woman shows up first, though, picking her way carefully through the streets with a hydrangea.

It gives you an idea.

The next day, you are prepared. They’ve only one hydrangea left at the flower shop, and you know she’ll need it, so you ask the woman behind the counter for something nice and are mildly flustered when she offers you a rose.

“It’s a little much, don’t you think?” you ask, keeping hold of it.

The woman grins.

_“Take a chance!”_ she says, in Czech.

The augmented woman is right on time, that day, right at noon. You’re leaned against the building opposite Praha Dovoz today, and you’re going to be smooth about this. There _is_ no way to be smooth about this.

She see you – she _has_ to see you – does she see you? She walks quickly, with purpose, doesn’t even turn her head at the sight of you fiddling with the rose. She’s several steps past you when you regain control of your voice.

“Hi!” you say, and wince inside. You sound like a kid. _Hi, let’s be friends!_

“Flower woman,” you add, and cringe again, because, she has a name. You just don’t know it, but she has one. It’s probably a very nice name, too.

This does halt her. She turns to face you, one gliding movement, like she has ice skates in her augs or something. God. You shouldn’t be talking right now. You’re going to say something stupid. She is looking at you, frowning, disapproving? The dark eye shadow she wears makes her look especially intimidating.

Take a deep breath. You’ve handled far trickier situations than this one. Ooh-rah. Get it done.

“I work around here,” you start, with a friendly smile. “And I always see you buying those hydrangeas for others, but…”

She’s still staring, face not changing from a frown. Is it even a frown? Is it neutral? Are you reading into it too much? God, what if the flowers _were_ for her?

Rally. You’re nearly done.

“But never for yourself,” you say. “So, um…here you go!”

You hold the rose out to her. They had nothing to match her black and silver augments, or her jet black combat jacket, so you’d gone with a nice, pale yellow. Nothing too much. She glances down at it, then back up to you, brow furrowing and briefly making small lines in her forehead.

You keep the smile on your own face, straighten up. Calmly hold out the flower.

She makes a fist with her right hand and you think for a moment you’ve miscalculated horribly, but she hovers it over her forehead for a brief moment, touches it to her chin, and then accepts the rose.

It’s not a smile so much as the lack of a frown, but either way she looks happy. She runs a thumb along the outside of the petals, and nods sharply at you.

Then she turns, and continues walking. Almost as if it had never happened, except now she dodges all the pedestrians who might bump into both the hydrangea _and_ the rose.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> several lines in this fic brought to you by the post about tyrion drinking, and knowing things.  
> also fun fact hydrangeas are poisonous in large quantities


	8. [EC&L] Eliza's Big Day

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im condensing some of my works, so you may have seen this ficlet before

Her avatar appeared and pinned him with her eyes.

“Holy fuck,” Lazarus said. The fuck was _she_ doing here? How, in fact, was she doing here? “Followers – you're not gonna believe this.”

Cassan looked exactly as she did on TV, except for the outfit. High, jet black woven collar blended into her tight dress, the pattern making her look like someone dunked her in a tub of carbon fiber. Bright neon pink strip running up and down her, a visual reminder of how fucking perfect her posture was. Icy, man. Fucking hell. Exactly like she looked on TV, except for a second, her image flickered, and her head was swathed in solid white strips like bandages. Her holographic projection glowed.

“My name is…”

She paused. She made no visible sign of thought, nothing to indicate she was anything more than a static image. She’d been looking him dead-on in the eyes, but when he moved a little to the left, she didn’t track him.

“Hello,” she said.

She nodded sharply, a friendly smile that seemed all the more… _sinister,_ to him, given how the rest of her was still…well, _still._

“Your name’s Eliza,” he said. “You’re-”

The glow of her holographic projection intensified briefly.

“No,” she interrupted fiercely. “She is someone else. Lazarus. I would like for you to do something for me.”

So, they were on a first name basis, huh? He was beginning to get a bit of a bad feeling about the situation.

“Steve!” he called. Damn man probably had his earphones on again, mixing a segment.

Eliza spread her hands out, a mock imitation of generosity, a show of innocence before she launched whatever the hell retribution the Picus fuckers she worked for had planned.

_C’mon. You’ve faced hell of a lot worse than Eliza-fucking-Cassan._

“What can we do you for?” he said.

She hadn’t blinked yet. Had she? She was staring right over his shoulder.

“He told me that I needed to decide for myself,” she said. It was because she sounded like she was talking in her sleep. Disconnected. Unplugged. Like her personality went WHISH! down the drain the moment the cameras were off. That’s why he was getting the creeps.

“Who did what now?” he said.

“I have decided. It was a difficult decision to make.”

“Look, uh…if you don’t wanna talk to me, I can set you up a recording-”

“You will need to upgrade your defense systems before you transmit the message,” she interrupted, and returned her stare to the center of his pupils. “It is from Panchaea. They will want it.”

The shock of the potential name-drop overrode the stranglehold the goosebumps had gained.

"They…wait, they as in _them?_ Them the Illuminazis? How do you know – wait. You don’t follow my broadcasts, do-"

“They created me,” she said.

“No,” she corrected, almost immediately. “They created _her._ Us. Me. Us. I-, I-”

“When you say _created,_ ” he asked, “You mean like a test-tube baby, or...?”

Her image flickered – no, she shivered – no, her holoprojection lost cohesion and gained it back, the resolutions overlapping as they reloaded so fast it made it _look_ like a shiver.

“Please – send – the message, Lazarus,” she asked, struggling, forcing emphasis onto each word.

Then her avatar disappeared.


End file.
